A Night in the Luxembourg

By Remy De Gourmont

"A Night in the Luxembourg" combines philosophy, religion, and art. It's a philosophical tale, written as a book in a book, telling the story of a man who makes a semi-magical travel accompanied by a divine personality, similar to the embodiment of Jesus Christ. The protagonist visits earthly places like the Luxembourg Gardens, which transform into a piece of paradise, where the heroes have conversations on different matters. The book is perfect for those wishing to live through the intellectual renaissance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: Nov 21, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547418764

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Remy de Gourmont

A Night in the Luxembourg

EAN 8596547418764

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

A general, but necessarily inadequate, account of the personality and works of one of the finest intellects of his generation will be found in the Appendix. I am here concerned only with Une Nuit au Luxembourg, which, though it is widely read in almost every other European language, is now for the first time translated into English.

This book, at once criticism and romance, is the best introduction to M. de Gourmont's very various works. It created a sensation in France. I think it may do as much in England, but I am anxious lest this sensation should be of a kind honourable neither to us nor to the author of a remarkable book. I do not wish a delicate and subtle artist, a very noble philosopher, noble even if smiling, nobler perhaps because he smiles, to be greeted with accusations of indecency and blasphemy. But I cannot help recognising that in England, as in many other countries, these accusations are often brought against such philosophers as discuss in a manner other than traditional the subjects of God and woman. These two subjects, with many others, are here the motives of a book no less delightful than profound.

The duty of a translator is not comprised in mere fidelity. He must reproduce as nearly as he can the spirit and form of his original, and, since in a work of art spirit and form are one, his first care must be to preserve as accurately as possible the contours and the shading of his model. But he must remember (and beg his readers to remember) that the intellectual background on which the work will appear in its new language is different from that against which it was conceived. When the new background is as different from the old as English from French, he cannot but recognise that it disturbs the chiaroscuro of his work with a quite incalculable light. It gives the contours a new quality and the shadows a new texture. His own accuracy may thus give his work an atmosphere not that which its original author designed.

I have been placed in such a dilemma in translating this book. Certain phrases and descriptions were, in the French, no more than delightful sporting of the intellect with the flesh that is its master. In the English, for us, less accustomed to plain-speaking, and far less accustomed to a playful attitude towards matters of which we never speak unless with great solemnity, they became wilful parades of the indecent. It is important to remember that they were not so in the French, but were such things as might well be heard in a story told in general conversation—if the talkers were Frenchmen of genius.

There is no ugliness in the frank acceptance of the flesh, that is a motive, one among many, in this book, and perhaps more noticeable by us than the author intended. No doubt it never occurred to M. de Gourmont that he was writing for the English. We are only fortunate listeners to a monologue, and must not presume upon our position to ask him to remember we are there.

The character of that monologue is such, I think, as to justify me in tampering very little with its design. Not only is Une Nuit au Luxembourg not a book for children or young persons—if it were, the question would be altogether different—but it is not a book for fools, or even for quite ordinary people. I think that no reader who can enjoy the philosophical discussion that is its greater part will quarrel with its Epicurean interludes. He will either forgive those passages of which I am speaking as the pardonable idiosyncrasy of a great man, or recognise that they are themselves illustrations of his philosophy, essential to its exposition, and raised by that fact into an intellectual light that justifies their retention.

The prurient minds who might otherwise peer at these passages, and enjoy the caricatures that their own dark lanterns would throw on the muddy wall of their comprehension, will, I think, be repelled by the nobility of the book's philosophy. They will seek their truffles elsewhere, and find plenty.

M. de Gourmont is perhaps more likely to be attacked for blasphemy, but only by those who do not observe his piety towards the thing that he most reverences, the purity and the clarity of thought. He worships in a temple not easy to approach, a temple where the worshippers are few, and the worship difficult. It is impossible not to respect a mind that, in its consuming desire for liberty, strips away not fetters only but supports. Fetters bind at first, but later it is hard to stand without them.

His book is not a polemic against Christianity, in the same sense as Nietzsche's Anti-Christ, though it does propose an ethic and an ideal very different from those we have come to consider Christian. When he smiles at the Acts of the Apostles as at a fairy tale, he adds a sentence of incomparable praise and profound criticism: These men touch God with their hands. It may shock some people to find that the principal speaker in the book is a god who claims to have inspired, not Christ alone, but Pythagoras, Epicurus, Lucretius, St. Paul and Spinoza with the most valuable of their doctrines. It will not, I think, shock any student of comparative religion. He will find it no more than a poet's statement of an idea that has long ceased to disturb the devout, the idea that all religions are the same, or translations of the same religion. We recognise in the sayings of Confucius some of the loveliest of the sayings of Christ, and we find them again in Mohammed. Why not admit that the same voice whispered in their ears, for this, unless we think that the Devil can give advice as good as God's, we cannot help but believe. And that other idea, that the gods die, though their lives are long, should not shock those who know of Odin, notice the lessening Christian reverence for the Jewish Jehovah, and remember the story, so often and so sweetly told, of the voices on the Grecian coast, with their cry, Great Pan is dead! Great Pan is dead! Turning from particular ideas to the rule of life that the book proposes, we find a crystal-line Epicureanism. Virtue is, to be happy; and sin is, where we put it. Human wisdom is to live as if one were never to die, and to gather the present minute as if it were to be eternal. This is no doctrine that is easy to follow. The god does not offer it to the first comer, but to one who has schooled his mind to see hard things, and, having seen them, to rise above them. M. de Gourmont will tell no lies that he can avoid, especially when speaking to himself, but, if he burn himself, Phoenix-like, in the ashes of a sentimental universe, he has at least the hope of rising from the pyre with stronger wings and more triumphant flight. He will start with no more than the assumption that the universe as we know it is the product of a series of accidents. He will not persuade himself that man is the climax of a carefully planned mechanical process of evolution, nor will he hide his origin in imagery like that of Genesis, or like that which certain modern scientists are quite unable to avoid. He turns science against the scientists with the irrefutable remark that only a change in the temperature saved us from the dominion of ants. Instinct for him is arrested intellect, and he is ready to imagine man in the future doing mechanically what now he does by intention. Such ideas would crush a feeble brain or bind it with despair. They lead him to the Epicureanism that is the only philosophy that they do not overthrow. Our roses and our women make us the equals of the gods, and even envied by them.

All his criticism, not of one or two ideas alone, but of the history of philosophy, the history of woman, the history of man and the history of religion, is made with a mastery so absolute as to dare to be playful. The winter night was changed to a spring morning as the god walked in the Luxembourg, and the wintry cold of